On the surface this looks like a typical Zelda-like, and in some ways it is very reminiscent of older Zelda titles like A Link to the Past. What makes this game stand out however isn't in it's similarities to Zelda games, but rather in it's differences.

Much like Outer Wilds, this is one of those games where I can't give you too much information without spoiling major aspects of the game. In fact, that is the very premise the game is built around. Despite the Zelda-like layout and Souls-like combat, the core of this game revolves around information. Everything in this game is written in an undecipherable wingding language, leaving the player guessing as to what signs mean throughout the world. More importantly though, as you go through the game, you'll find pages of the game's "instruction manual", being very reminiscent of the manuals in older NES/SNES titles. This manual is also mostly in this wingding language, forcing the player to decipher meanings from the pictures, other pages, and context clues. While you may think this sounds annoying upon reading this review, let me assure you that this is excellently pulled off, making you want to find these manual pages and keeping you thinking about what some enigmatic riddle could mean long after you've put the game down. When you do figure something new out, the "Ah-Ha!" moment is unparalleled and you feel like a genius.
The only time these manual puzzles become really over the top to solve is in the post-game for the "good" ending. I did not actually manage to solve all of these, but despite it, I never found it too frustrating to go on, and if anything makes me even more determined to eventually go back and solve that mystery.

Beyond that, I can tell you that while there aren't that many boss fights, they are quite enjoyable and visually pleasing. The exploration in this game is top notch. The items are very fun to use, and combat in general is fun. The skills you get as you go through the game, as well as how you get them, are also a blast. I will say, while the story is pretty decent, it's probably the weakest part of the game overall.

Truly this is a game I would recommend to nearly everyone. One of the best games in every genre it falls into.

I can't tell if I love or hate this game.

Gameplay loop is very solid, but I am absolutely convinced that 50% of the rooms in this game only exist to pad out the run time and justify the price tag. Also some of the design choices in the latter half of the game were confusing and infuriating.

Still, overall a fun game to play that looks pretty and has an okay story. Sometimes. Ending didn't land but the rest of the story was good.

This has to be the strangest game I've fallen in love with. At first I didn't understand the point, and I quickly put it down and didn't think about it again for quite a long time. Then I picked it up on a whim and gave it a longer try, and suddenly I was engrossed. Every clip made me want to uncover more, to understand the plots of the various movies, to understand what happened to each character, and to uncover the other mysteries in the game.

As of now, my only real complaint is simply that it's possible to unlock the ending while missing significant chunks of information, which makes that ending quite confusing. Some clips also seem very difficult to unlock so it's easy to get stuck.

That said, the good far, far outweighs those minor complaints. The stories in this game are all phenomenal. The acting is top notch. The game frequently rewards your curiosity and encourages you to look for more. Immortality also never feels stale as they are masters at switching up the tone from scene to scene and giving you just enough to want to find more and complete the picture.

If you have any interest in interactive storytelling and/or mystery games, then I think you owe it to yourself to give this one a try.

This is a game I didn't know I needed in my life.
I had never heard of this series before, and it wasn't on my radar at all, but all of a sudden all of the Civilizations channels I follow started talking about this game so I gave it a try. So very worth it.

This game is the perfect love child of Civilizations and Heroes of Might and Magic, with a bit of Total War thrown into the mix. It takes only the best parts of all of those games and mixes them together to create a gameplay loop that is at the same time familiar to fans of those franchises, yet unique enough to be its own thing. City building and diplomacy aspects of Civilization 6 are on display, but combat is much more like the HoMM, which is fantastic in my opinion.

Customization is also king here. Thanks to all of the incredible customization options in this game, I can't even really tell you how many factions there are because every game your units, skills and traits are determined by what you choose to pick, both at the race creation screen but also throughout the game. The first game I played, I was using a race of molemen who used Earth magic to create golems and eventually turn themselves into a race of golden gods. The next game I played a Druid/necromancer hybrid of cat people who's concept was that they descended from Egyptian gods who utilized all beasts, living and dead, to further their goals of conquest. Now I'm playing a race of assassin halflings that's elevated themselves to Angels of despair, being experts in deception, mental manipulation and deadly strikes.
All of this comes from decisions made mid-game, and that really makes you feel in complete control of the direction your civilization is taking.

I'm just raving, so I'll wrap this up. The game is excellent. If you're on the fence, just look up some of the excellent youtube videos and see if this is your type of strategy game. If you do feel even remotely interested after that, take the leap. You won't regret it.

It's hard to write a review for this game because of how biased I am.

I love this game, and it is easily one of my games of the year for 2023. No contest.

So why do I love this game so much? Simply put, Your Only Move Is Hustle encapsulates everything that makes fighting games fun to play, and delivers it in a package with no execution barrier or reaction time necessary. This game is essentially fighting game chess, and it is wonderful.
Now that it's on steam, it even has more options for everyone.

Want to beat up random people? Hop into a steam lobby!
Don't want to play other people but you do like crafting awesome looking fight scenes? Single player is right up your alley.
Tired of only 4 characters? There's an unlimited number of cool modded characters in the workshop. I'm partial to Neon White myself.
Want more backgrounds/stages? Workshop has a bunch of those too.
Want even more competition, check out the ranked mods which add ranked lobbies to the main menu.

If you have even a passing interest in fighting games, I suggest you check this gem out.

This game is one of the most unique concepts I've seen. It's a puzzle fighter, but has more elements of fighting games than most puzzle fighters.

Concept is really simple: Put similar colored blocks into groups of 3 or more to send them as projectiles to the opponent. If they get hit, their board shrinks. Repeat until one player loses.
Sounds simple right? Now add in 10 unique characters, each with their own passives and supers, a "hype" meter which acts kind of like an X-factor, and a parry mechanic and you have a deep and interesting game.

That said the game is not perfect, and does in fact have a few fatal flaws, most notably that there is no online mode. On top of that, the single player options are pretty limited. As fun as this game is, if you're not playing against other human beings, this won't have long lasting appeal to you. I have heard that it works over parsec, but I admit I haven't tried this myself since I have a local scene who plays, and we've even done quite a few tournaments for the game.
Unfortunately, the updates to the game are also irregular, which also doesn't help with the lasting appeal.

Still, I strongly suggest that you try it out since it costs less than a Happy Meal, and try to get your friends to play it for a really good time.

I originally heard this referred to as Risk of Rain 2 meets Borderlands, and honestly that kind of fits. You have a large cast characters that all play very differently with their own unique powers and talent trees, as well as a buttload of guns/weapons which themselves can come with a near infinite assortment of inscriptions to modify their behavior.

The game has come a long way from where it started, and with the new DLC it is solidly a 10/10 game for me. It's a blast in both single player and Co-op. The Reincarnation difficulties drastically change up the game too, so end game content on this game is incredibly fun and doesn't get stale. The spiritual Link option is especially fun since it lets you synergize scrolls and abilities.

This game has risen the ranks to become one of my favorite games overall. I Strongly recommend it.

This is the game that I didn't know that I needed in my life.

This is simultaneously an incredible tactics game and a great base defense game, while also being a fun roguelike. I love that characters aren't class locked, allowing me to customize my characters and try new strategies every run. I also appreciate that I feel like I have a sense of meta-progression even in the middle of runs and pretty regularly. It makes even failed runs feel worthwhile, and oh boy there will be failed runs. I'm 23 hours in and still haven't won one, but it doesn't feel as frustrating as failed runs in some other roguelikes since every run yields real progression and helps me formulate a better strategy for the next one. Playing out your "Last stands" intense, and surviving one is such a great feeling.

That said, it's not perfect. I've seen some people call it "grindy", and I do get where they're coming from. While the meta progression is enough to satiate me from run to run, it is true that you're defending the same map from the same hordes every time. There is enemy variation, but most often you won't see much of it nor will it matter much for the first few nights. Considering how often you will lose, I can understand some people finding it repetitive, even if I personally didn't.
Runs are also brutally long, which is alleviated by the meta-progression mid runs IMO, but sometimes you know a run is going to fall apart and since you don't get much in rewards for failed nights, there's not much motivation to stay in a failing run unless you enjoy playing out the last stands (Which I do).
The music is also really good, but I do wish there were more songs for the various nights as the main one does get repetitive when you hear it in every battle, which is a very large portion of the game.

All in all, if you like tactics games and/or challenging roguelikes, you owe it to yourself to check out this gem. While there are flaws, the core game play loop is so good that I find myself not noticing them until after I've put the game down, read them online and go "Huh, yeah I guess that's a fair point".

I really want to like this game. It's beautiful, well voice acted and it shows that a lot of love went into it. The game's core gameplay loop and main mechanic devil mode are so cool too.
So why the negative review? Well, while the main mechanics and look/feel/story are great, there are some really bad design decisions holding this game back.

The game's story is split into several chapters, each with their own story, but each one seems pretty long. Combined with the crazy difficulty curve, this means over the almost 5 hours I've played now I have only seen the first chapter on 4 separate runs. Now yes, the roguelike genre is supposed to be punishing and focus on meta-progression to advance, but my failed first chapter runs are longer than my successful runs in other roguelikes, and the meta progression rewards seem pretty bad when failing a run, at least when compared to the time spent.

Now yes, this could all be a "get gud" issue, but the game doesn't really do a good job of explaining how to do that either. Despite the lengthy tutorial, I keep encountering mechanics I don't understand. For example, on my last run I made a full spirit damage team of Headless Horseman, Bloody Mary and the White Lady, and it worked perfectly well until I ran into an enemy which inexplicably stopped taking spirit damage from anyone except Bloody Mary. He had no buffs, and his max SP kept decreasing every turn so I assume there was some mechanic I didn't know about going on, but I have no idea what it was still.
The other issue is some otherwise good runs can completely fail due to RNG. In the same run as the above, I entered an event to to warn some witches of inquisitors. I failed it with a 90% chance to pass, which happens, but it triggered a crazy hard encounter which destroyed my otherwise good run. Now yes, a good run ending to bad RNG also happens in other roguelikes, but man it feels a lot worse when I know that I'm going to get a single skill for my last hour or more of play AND have to go back through the same story beats again because despite being 5 chapters in, I'm still in the first story.

I kind of feel like I'm complaining about something that could be a skill issue, but it feels more frustrating than fun and I don't feel like I'm progressing much with failed runs. It's a shame because this game shows so much promise. I'm probably going to put it down and play other roguelikes for a while and come back to it after a few more patches.

I'll be perfectly honest, I was not expecting to enjoy this game that much. I loved Breath of the Wild, but eventually I got to a point where I'd "had enough", put it down and never picked it back up. All of the promotional content and hype leading up to it's release did not convince me there were enough new things to hold my interest again. Then the game released, and I found I was wrong.

I am truly amazed at how much Nintendo managed to revolutionize their open world sandbox with just a couple simple changes. The highlight is of course the Ultrahand crafting system, which allows you to explore and interact with the sandbox of this world completely new and unpredictable ways, and makes this game even less linear than it's predecessor. This system rewards creativity, and allows for traversal and interactions that make you feel like you're cheating the game. A great example of this would be the climb to the Sky temple, which is supposed to take you through a massive obstacle course to reach the top. Except I grabbed rockets from a different sky area I'd explored, stuck them to a flying machine and blasted past 1/2 of the climb.
The game is chock-full of moments like this, and it feels wonderful.

Ultrahand is not alone though. The Rewind and Ascend powers, while they sounded a bit basic, are also invaluable tools that let you tackle the world and it's puzzles in drastically new ways, and along with Ultrahand make Hyrule feel new and fresh again.
Hyrule is not the only area to explore in this game though. The addition of the sky and depths areas, which I thought would be tedious to explore, actually ended up being incredibly fun, especially since they encouraged different uses of these new exploration powers, and have DRASTICALLY different vibes.

While Hyrule feels like an inhabited world where normal RPG events are taking place, the sky islands feel like archeological sights. When up there you're exploring the ruins of an ancient race, solving their puzzles in ways vastly different from anywhere else in the game, and occasionally dealing with the security systems they left behind. Travel here is almost exclusively by air and such a blast to engage in.

By contrast, the depths are dark, scary and dangerous. The ground and walls can hurt you, and the monsters are much more terrifying and deadly. And god forbid you lose your light sources. This is all compounded by the fact you can't heal damage normally while down there, adding to the sense of dread and danger of being in that area.

For all the praise I give it though, ToTK does have a few downsides that we have to talk about. The most blatant and obvious one is the controls. Nintendo has kept the same controls as BotW for the most part, but those controls were outdated already when that game came out, and now in 2023 it feels even moreso. Not using industry standards like running with L3 push and instead giving it a dedicated button feels like a step backwards, especially when the game is already making you do crazy button combinations due to lack of available buttons for even basic actions like switching weapons or fusing arrows.
Additionally some of the "repeated" actions are very tedious. There is no reason why we couldn't streamline cooking or turning in korok seeds. Yes, you can skip "some" of the animations, but it's still a tedious affair that made me want to engage with those mechanics as little as possible.
Finally, I have to address that it is very possible to get yourself stuck in multiple places in the tutorial area before you unlock the Ascend ability. Might be a minor gripe, but getting ultrahand encourages you to experiment, yet you just might end up get yourself stuck and be forced to reload old saves if you experiment too hard.
You can also do this by entering some temples (At least one) before doing the quest to gain access to them, but this is a minor issue since by then you can teleport out.

Overall though, this is an excellent game that I strongly recommend to anyone who is a fan of Zelda or open world games.

This was one of my first roguelikes, and boy was it a good one. Excellent humor, one of the best roguelike stories, a fun gimmick and an excellent gameplay loop with infinite replayability.
I've played through this game on multiple files and multiple platforms, alone and with friends, and STILL I haven't seen everything the game has to offer.

This is a bullet hell style roguelike in the same vein as Binding of Isaac, but in my eyes has massively improved every aspect of the game in every single way. Another one I would recommend to almost everyone.

I hate to give this a bad rating with how much I liked the original, but the apple fell very far from the tree.
The game drastically changed genres to be more of a 2-D platforming/bullet hell hybrid in the same vein as Neon Abyss, but it is sadly not succeeding at that. This is unfortunately one of the worst of it's new genre, with the game making a lot of design choices that would be baffling even if it wasn't tied to the source material. Almost every design choice in this game changes or removes the mechanics that made the first one good, and adds mechanics that make this game frustrating to play. Examples of this include the uncontrollably changing weapons which takes control of your run out of your hands, sometimes trapping you with weapons your enemies are immune to.

All in all a disappointing game when judged on its own merits, but straight up heartbreaking when compared to the masterpiece that was its predecessor.